Jerome McMillan. He was the same height as her, with floppy bronze hair, sharp hazel eyes and a voice that had been cultivated at one of Britain’s top public schools. But what she loved about him most of all was his laughter. He was one of Curtis and Hopkirk’s rising stars and hailed from a family who had statutes and torts running through their veins; his father was a former QC and his grandfather had been an attorney general. And Jerome had chosen Daisy Sullivan to be the girl he wanted to be seen around town with. They’d been dating for just over a year now and she still couldn’t believe it. Jerome was one of the most generous, kind-hearted men she knew, and suspected she would ever know. He was the kind of man she’d never have met in a zillion years, had her dad still been alive. That’s why she’d never risk telling him about her background. Men like Jerome didn’t come to girls like her every day of the week and that’s why she was going to do everything on God’s earth to keep him.
‘Is it true?’ he let out when he reached her.
‘Charlie? Gone to the great Bailey in the sky?’ She nodded. ‘Yes.’
Immediately he wrapped his arms around her. She sank gratefully into him. Trust Jerome to know what she needed at that moment, someone to lean on.
‘How are you bearing up?’ He stared gently into her face.
‘I feel like I’m the one getting ready to be buried, not Charlie.’
His smooth palms gently ran down her arms. She flinched when his hands brushed the chunky, gold bracelets that she always wore on her wrists. Daisy hated anyone touching them, even Jerome. She eased her arms from his embrace. ‘Well, I’m here,’ he said soothingly, ‘so any time you need a shoulder to cry on I’ve got two waiting for you.’
That almost made her start blubbing. How had she ever deserved a guy like this?
‘I hope this doesn’t sound too insensitive darling,’ he continued. ‘But I was going to meet Charlie today to discuss the Woodbridge class-action case.’
The firm were involved in a high-profile lawsuit against Woodbridge Council for its handling of child-abuse allegations in its care homes in the early nineties. A group of adults, who had once been in its care system alleged that the council had turned a deaf ear to their cries for help. Now they were suing the council for a record four million pounds, one million for each of the claimants. The case would have come and gone with little media attention, except one of the adults was the lead singer of one of Britain’s top pop girl bands, Electric Star.
‘He said that he had something that might help me with the case. Something to do with Maxwell Henley, former leader of the council, who disappeared twenty years ago and is now believed to be living in Spain.’
‘I can’t help you I’m afraid.’ She took a step back from him. ‘Randal wants to speak to me, so I’d better see him. If I hear anything about what Charlie was going to tell you, I’ll let you know.’
‘Don’t forget that you’re meeting my parents next Wednesday at their cocktail party. They’re eager to meet you before they fly out to their place in Florida on Thursday.’
This would be the first time she’d be meeting his parents and she was dead scared. What if they saw right through her? What if they could spot a chav at forty paces, no matter how well dressed she was? Although being fingered as a council estate girl was better than the real story . . .
‘Don’t look so worried.’ He squeezed the top of her arm. ‘They are going to adore you, just like I do. And when am I going to meet your people? We’ve been hitting the town for a year now, so don’t you think it’s about time?’
The thought of him meeting Jackie – the woman who’d taken her into her home after her dad’s death – and her surrogate aunts scared her even more than it did meeting his parents. Jackie and her aunts had once led troubled lives. Lives that had, once upon a time, been mixed up with her dad’s. She’d even heard it whispered that Auntie Ollie had been a child soldier in the African country of Sankura. Perhaps he’d think that was cool? Perhaps he would, but only if he was reading about it in the papers. No, she couldn’t see Jerome meeting them being a party made in heaven. And as for him meeting Misty . . . she took her mind swiftly away from that thought.
‘Let’s see how I get on with your parents first, OK?’ Her eyes flicked to the large double doors at the end of the corridor. ‘Got to go.’
He gave her a swift peck on the cheek, then was gone. Daisy stared nervously at Randal Curtis’s office door. Meeting this man always made her nerves feel like electric wires since the day she’d learnt Randal believed her dad had murdered his son.
‘So, how did he go?’ Daisy quietly asked the older man sitting at the desk in the huge, plush, but businesslike office as she stood in the doorway.
Randal Curtis was still an impressive figure in his late fifties, with a full head of dyed brown hair and a body he kept in good condition in order to keep up with the many affairs he had behind his wife’s back, and a brain that made him a legend in courtroom brawls. He sat in a leather swivel chair in front of a huge glass window that had an eagle-eye view over this corner of the capital.
Daisy eyed the surviving senior partner of the firm nervously. She always got the jitters around him. When she’d first started at Curtis and Hopkirk she’d liked Randal Curtis, ignored the nasty nickname the other lawyers called him behind his back – Randy Randall. She had heard on the office rumour mill that Randal had come from a working-class London family and had grafted his way, through sheer hard work, up the rungs of the law establishment. She’d liked that because it made Randal sound a bit like her. That is until the day Charlie had told her to never mention who her father was. It wasn’t as though she had been telling everyone the news, but when she’d asked him why, his answer had frozen her to the spot. Randal believed her dad had killed his son. His eldest boy had pegged out on a speedball in a Whitechapel bedsit fifteen years earlier. In his grief Randall had convinced himself that the East End’s then leading criminal, Frankie Sullivan, had supplied the drugs. On no account, Charlie had warned her, should she ever mention who her dad was to Charlie’s partner. If she did then Randy Randall was going to return a very guilty verdict on her career and there wouldn’t be any appeal. That warning made her realise that her old world and her new one were very different and should be kept apart, as much as she possibly could.
‘Take a seat.’ Randal waved his hand at the single leather chair on the other side of the desk.
Daisy closed the door, crossed the room and took a seat. She brushed her long hands down her tailored black skirt, made by an up-and-coming designer who had a stall in East London’s Spitalfields market. She turned her blue gaze to him as her thumb anxiously rubbed against the cold bracelet on her left wrist.
‘I’m afraid it was the usual end for the super-fit, non-smoking, trim professional – a heart attack,’ Randal said wryly. ‘Apparently he was having an early morning game of squash and collapsed.’ Daisy’s teeth clipped her bottom lip as a disturbing image of Charlie in pain on the floor shook her mind. ‘There was nothing they could do for him by the time they got him to the hospital.’ Randal coughed, clearing his throat, clearing the image of Charlie from Daisy’s mind. ‘This is a sad day indeed, not just for us, but for the whole of the justice community.’
Daisy nodded, not wanting to be in here any longer than she had to. She half rose out of her chair.
‘One minute, please.’ Shit. She sank back down in the chair.
He pulled out the top drawer of his desk. Took out a long, thickly rolled Cuban. Clipped the end and lit up.
‘You don’t mind, do you? I know it’s against the legislation, but I’m trying to avoid a heart attack . . .’
He leant back in his chair as he puffed once. Twice. The third time he gazed intently at Daisy through the rising smoke. ‘This is all such an unfortunate business. Death you know. I don’t suppose someone as young as you has had many dealings with the grim reaper yet?’
Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong mate. She knew all about t
he grim reaper, in fact he was virtually a friend of the family.
‘No, can’t say I have.’ Her eyes darted to stare out of the rain-soaked window and settled on a magpie that sat on the window ledge. She shivered as if she was the bird sitting in the unseasonably damp June air, gazing in from outside.
‘Do you know how long myself and Charlie had been in business together?’ She knew because Charlie had told her. But she didn’t say that. Just shook her head because she knew the man opposite her wanted to tell his story. ‘Thirty-three years. Not many people realise this but we started out representing some of the less savoury characters in the world. The scum that no one else wanted to touch. But we kept going until we’d established a name for ourselves. That’s what you’re going to have to do, Daisy, get your hands dirty sometimes, and work hard.’ He sighed and tipped the cigar ash into the chrome ashtray on the desk. ‘Now that silly bugger has gone and left me. His wife’s going to want all his stuff and that’s where you come in. I need you to go through his office with one of those fine combs you ladies like to use and find out what belongs to the firm and what the wife can have.’
Daisy shuffled urgently onto the edge of the chair. ‘But Mr Curtis, I’m due to start assisting Jerome on the Woodbridge class-action case . . .’
The older man waved his large hands in the air sweeping her words aside. ‘I know that you’re eager to prove yourself, but don’t forget that it was Charlie who picked you out of all the students for a work placement here two years ago and he went out of his way to make sure that you understood the business inside and out. Is it too much to ask for you to pay him back by sorting through his life?’ He leant back and stabbed her with a look that made her feel like she was in the dock. ‘Besides,’ he carried on. ‘I need that office if I’m going to install a new partner in there soon.’
The heartless bastard. They’d hardly pulled the sheet over Charlie’s head and this wanker was already measuring the curtains in his office.
‘When do you want me to start?’
He picked his cigar back up. ‘A lawyer strikes while the witness is wobbling in the box, does he not?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Now would be a good time.’
Daisy nodded as she stood up. She turned and quickly moved towards the door, eager to get out.
‘Oh and Daisy.’ She stopped, mid-stride. Shit, what now? Turned back around. ‘If you should come across anything that’s, let’s just say, “interesting”, you will bring it to me, won’t you?’
His statement startled her. ‘What do you mean “interesting”? Charlie was a straight-up type of guy . . .’
But before she could finish, they were interrupted by a knock on the door. It opened to reveal Randal’s PA in the doorway. The woman was a young kitten, just the way Randal liked them. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt . . .’
‘This had better be good, my girl.’
‘There are two men to see Mr Hopkirk.’ Her plucked eyebrows shot up. ‘Two policemen.’
Chapter Three
‘Welcome, ladies! But I’m afraid you’ve heard wrong. The streets of London aren’t paved with gold. They’re paved with bloody needles and old condoms . . .’
The terrified group of eight women huddled together as they knelt on the dirty floor. They were in the basement of a Victorian terrace around the back of Whitechapel station, where the prostitutes and junkies picked up their punters and fixes day and night. And it wasn’t the dank smell that terrified the women. It wasn’t the narrow confines of the room. It wasn’t the tough muscular man and brassy-looking woman who stood on either side of the locked door. It was the woman who stood towering over them. And the unforgiving knife she held in her hand.
And they were right to feel shit scared. Wised-up Londoners belted in the opposite direction when confronted by forty-two-year-old Stella King. She bossed the gang that was usually described in the local papers as ‘well known to the police’. She stood six foot in her heels, with blond shoulder-length hair that bounced off her shoulders when she got really pissed off, and a face that she was the last to admit had seen enough nip and tuck over the years. Her densely powdered skin set her face into a frosty, icy mask. But her light grey eyes had a little spark, so people who didn’t know her too well took her to have a kind heart. Stella King hadn’t had a kind heart since she was fourteen years old.
Her heavily painted, cherry-red lips spread into an easy smile as she watched the women’s reaction. A knife was a knife in any language. The women had been unloaded from the van a few minutes ago, a shipment of illegals from the Ukraine. They had left their country, having paid through the nose, thinking they were on their way to jobs as dancers in London. Only they’d been misinformed. As soon as they arrived, two men had escorted them to the basement in Whitechapel. A couple had to be roughed up along the way when they started making noise. Now they realised that it wasn’t the men who controlled their future, but Stella and her knife.
Without speaking Stella leant down and grabbed the nearest woman by her ponytail. The woman screamed as she was yanked to her feet. Stella twisted her around to face the group. With easy, cutting motions she used the blade to tear through the woman’s blouse. The woman trembled as the knife cut through her flimsy bra. Soon her naked breast quivered for all to see. The woman sobbed when Stella placed the blade under her nipple. Without a flicker of emotion Stella turned her head to the side and with a quick nod motioned for the woman standing with the man near the door. Tatiana, who had been one of Stella’s girls for over a year now, came forward.
Stella tightened her hand on the captive woman’s hair and spoke in that gravelly voice that most people never forgot once they heard it. ‘I learnt this trick from a pimp I worked for when I was about your age.’ Tatiana translated her words into Ukrainian. She was one of Stella’s girls from her main brothel in Finsbury Park. She’d been in the terrified woman’s position once. Knew the score. She kept the emotion pinned back as she repeated Stella’s words.
‘He showed me once that it don’t take much to hack a nipple off. See it ain’t got any bone. He had this girl by her throat on the floor, just like where you are now. Took out this fucking wicked looking blade. You wanna know how many cuts it took to take it off?’ She stopped, letting her words settle over the women like poisonous gas. ‘Three.’
She shoved the sharp steel into the woman’s skin. Not too far, just enough so that a thin line of blood began to form. The woman groaned in pain. ‘Now, I don’t do that to my girls. I look after them. That’s why you’ve gotta count yourself lucky that you’re under my wing now.’ Her voice grew harder. ‘But my wing don’t come cheap. And that means that things could go either way. You can either end up dead, sliced up, floating down Father Thames – or you can do an honest day’s collar in one of my high-class houses of entertainment in this fair city. Subject to a licence fee, of course. We British are into free enterprise, not that clapped-out Communism you’re used to.’
As the Ukrainian translation rang across the room some of the woman began to weep.
‘Now the men who come to my houses expect to find nice young ladies who are more than happy to show them a good time. Don’t forget you can’t go nowhere because I’ve got your passports. But if you do the proverbial and go to the cops I will find you and cut your tongue out with my little friend here and you won’t be speaking to no one again in your life. So it’s simple: you talk, you’re dead.’
Abruptly she let the woman go. As the sobbing woman fell back in amongst the other women the door flew open. Another man, his leather jacket flapping around him, stepped into the room.
Stella’s mouth twisted as she stared at her twenty-two-year-old son Tommy. Typical Tommy, didn’t even apologise for being friggin’ late. He was a few inches shorter than her, with closely cropped brown hair, a tattoo of a black and white piano on his neck and a slim, sullen face that most women found good-looking. It was only when people got to know him better they saw the brutal side of his n
ature. He was a dead ringer for her old man, Stevie ‘Crazy’ King. The man who’d run the King empire with an iron grip and even tighter fist at home. Together she and Stevie had grown the family business from a van-load of toms, giving men a grope at their fantasies in dark alleys and cars, to one that dealt drugs, trafficked people and any of the other crimes on the cops’ top-ten list of what not to do with your life. Then the stupid bastard had gone and got himself knifed to death by some tart he was seeing on the side. Of course Stella had known about the other women, but she was the one he took down the aisle, his number one, and after the nightmare of her childhood that had been good enough. Besides, when he was pawing other women, he wasn’t pawing her.
She gave Tommy the once-over and mentally shook her head. He wasn’t a patch on her Stevie. Both Tommy and her daughter Jo-Jo were a sorry lot. They had brought enough grief to her door to last a lifetime. Then she remembered another little girl with piercing blue eyes . . . She shook the image from her mind because it was a time in her life she’d fought long and hard to forget.
‘I hope you ain’t been sniffing around those posh birds again?’ Stella bit out. ‘I’ve warned you about that. You fuck up again I ain’t clearing up the mess for you this time.’
Tommy had the grace to look away from his mum. He’d steered clear of posh birds for a few years now, but Stella was continually reminding him of how close he had come to going down for murder. The last bit of posh he’d slept with had disappeared off the face of the earth. He’d only meant to go out with the girl, do the usual partying and snorting the night away on coke and sex. But somehow the girl had ended up with a broken neck. That’s just how it got with him sometimes, totally out of control, no idea what he was doing until it was too late. The big mistake he’d made was not checking out who the girl was before. She’d turned out to be the only daughter of some company director with friends at the top of the Met police, out for a night on the razzle looking to see what the wild side of town had to offer. So with her being from a nice family and everything, the police were very interested when she didn’t come home. If a bird from down their street hadn’t come home, the police would have one of their dogs to look into it. Stella had cleaned the mess up and muddied the water, as usual, and had the body disposed of in a chemical plant out Canvey way, with all traces of Tommy removed. Everyone knew who’d done it. But the cops hadn’t been able to prove a thing. And since then they’d vowed to take Stella and her crew down. Mind you she still had a few influential cop associates, who still visited her numerous brothels to get their tackles-tickled.
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